The Azerothian Archives is a surprisingly deep event in World of Warcraft which has arrived with the 10.2.5 patch. It brings opportunities to earn new transmogs, mounts and pets, along with reputation to earn with old and new factions.

The Archives creates a new flavor of archaeology with an excavation mini-game, tracking and spotting artifacts, watching short scenes of local history, and a Big Dig event that feels like a combination of the Tuskarr Community Feast, a Suffusion Camp, and a Superbloom.

Other than a minor amount of some other reputations—a couple hundred Loamm Niffen rep, from an earlier quest this week, for example—nothing you’ll do in the Archives will make your character any stronger, so there's no need to take part if you aren’t interested in collections or cosmetics. If you’d like a selection of fun armor appearances, pets and mounts, however, here’s how to do the digs.

Unlock the Azerothian Archives world quests

The To the Archives! quest in Valdrakken comes from several very obviously placed flyers. It’ll send you to a floating chunk of land near Alge’thar Academy—the outdoor area, not the dungeon—in the Thaldraszus zone.

There, a couple of quests will introduce you to two mechanics used in the Archives: excavation and technoscrying. Complete them to learn how to use the doodads and perform the quests that’ll follow—don’t forget to pick up the weekly Big Dig quest, which will give you plenty of the fragments used as currency for armor appearances, and a good chunk of the Azerothian Archives event reputation.

Once you’ve completed these tutorials, you’ll get breadcrumb quests that send you to the zones where follow-up Archives activities are available. You’ll unlock Archives world quests in those areas as you complete them, first outdoors, then in Zaralek Cavern and Forbidden Reach. You only need to do this series once as the world quests unlock account-wide.

Completing the intro will also award you an Indiana Jones-style Archivist’s Buckled Cap.

How the Azerothian Archives event works

In excavation quests, you’ll drop a totem near an upwelling of energy, which will spawn an elemental to help you. The elemental will channel on the relic, and little elementals—or rocks or any number of other elemental objects—in the immediate vicinity will counter that channel.

Your job is to use the totem and the surrounding items to keep the relic “in balance” on a slider scale. While the marker is in the center area, you can excavate the relic, advancing a progress bar until it is freed.

In technoscrying quests, you’ll use goggles and a map graphic to look for artifacts. You’ll see pings that travel across the landscape—I found these to be pretty buggy in practice, frequently disappearing into terrain instead of moving over it. But the map graphic will give you a hotter/colder indication of when you’re getting close to a relic, and when you’re nearby, the field of view of the goggles will help light up the object, which you can then loot.

And finally, in research quests, you’ll use a companion to look for ghostly—and often adorable—clues they will then absorb. 

Join the Big Dig

The Big Dig is an hourly event but mercifully starts 30 minutes after the hour, so it doesn’t conflict with the Superbloom and other hourly happenings. It has a 10-minute timer, so you’ll be in and out without much fuss.

The event at the Traitor’s Rest in Azure Span gives you tasks to complete that award pages—think of these as the Bloom in Superbloom events in the Emerald Dream, which fill up a progress bar and periodically reward you with a cache of goodies. 

Those caches are odd; in one of my Digs, I was given a blue cache, then a green one, then an epic one, then another green one. In all cases, they generally contained fragments and grey vendor items, though they also have a chance of awarding items you can break down into still more fragments, which you’ll use to buy transmogs, etc.

There’s an NPC who will award tasks, but currently the wait to get a new task feels interminable, and without any visual indicator there’s no way to tell whether you’re close enough to be awarded one.

Elsewhere in the area, you can do additional tasks for pages, so it might be worth skipping the NPC tasks for now. Once the event comes to an end, a boss will spawn, giving you more fragments and rep and a chance at cosmetics and other rewards. You can also find cosmetics in tomes you discover during the event.

Azerothian Archives rewards

Each week you can earn 5,000 fragments from the Big Dig quest. You can spend them on all the rewards available from the Archives vendor: 

• Full Historian transmog set (59,000 fragments)
• Explorer’s Stonehide Packbeast mount (20,000 fragments)
• Cosmetic glasses appearances (12,000 fragments each)
• Explorer-themed weapons and offhands (10,000 fragments each)
• Explorer-themed backpack (15,000 fragments)

You can also buy an item to trade 1,000 fragments to your alts with no transfer penalty.

A second mount, the Clayscale Hornstrider, has the chance to drop from the final boss in the Big Dig. Two pets, including a sort of arcane otter and an arcane fox, come from achievements you can complete at the Big Dig: Finally at Rest and Just One More Thing.

Additionally, another full transmog set—the Excavator set—can be obtained a piece at a time from the Big Dig boss or from tomes during the event. It’s identical to the Historian set but with slightly different coloring, and both of these sets are recolors of the Renowned Explorer’s Attire from the Recruit-a-Friend bonuses.

The Archives quests are still a bit buggy, and it feels like the pace of acquiring fragments could be a bit faster. But overall, this is a surprising amount of depth for a brand-new outdoor event. Enjoy beefing up your collections!